


As the Sun Rises

by rispacooper



Category: The Eagle (2011)
Genre: Ancient Rome, First Time, Historical, Identity Issues, M/M, PTSD, Romance, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Identity, Sexual Tension, Underage Sex, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-29
Updated: 2011-07-29
Packaged: 2017-10-21 23:15:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/230930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rispacooper/pseuds/rispacooper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marcus has some problems working things out after they came back from getting the Eagle. Post-movie, obviously. YES. That title sounds like a soap opera.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As the Sun Rises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dlasta](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=dlasta).



> Warnings: Okay, the Romans were weird and dirty all around. But there’s references to underage things they would have had no problem with, but we do, so, warnings. Underage stuff in flashback, with the dubious consent this implies.

Marcus has fever dreams after they return from the beyond the Wall with the Eagle. That is what he calls them, fever dreams, though he isn’t ill in any way he can name. He calls them that because he does not know what they are and neither does any learned healer or priest his uncle calls to the house.

Fever dreams are the same stiff jumble of nightmares and damp, heated visions and Marcus wakes from them not certain he is awake until he falls asleep again only to be roused by the bright sunlight of midday and Esca’s frown.

He knows what other soldiers might call his dreams, when the brave men of Rome dare to speak of secret, dark fears to other brave men of Rome who have lived with blood and loss. But he also knows that his dreams are different from remembered terrors and the ghosts of dead friends, though how they differ is something he tells no one.

Silence is his only friend aside from the bond he shares with Esca, although the dreams continue with his tongue behind his teeth and each day he wishes a little more to tell all to Esca, if only to ease the alarm in Esca’s face that Esca is not hiding.

There is impatience in Esca’s gaze too, as though he is growing tired of Marcus’s weakness, but Esca has not left him, not yet, and Marcus thinks he ought to feel grateful that Esca had remained at his side even once free, that Esca’s slender body now sleeps in his chamber in a pallet by his bed to wake him from his dreams if he cannot on his own.

Esca’s hand on his shoulder burns, and Marcus wonders often if dying men in the throes of delirium could ever feel as hot as he does then when he wakes to Esca’s face and hand.

He thinks of dying too in the panting, paralyzed moments after his eyes open and cannot remember who he is and thinks he must be dead already. For that is what Marcus dreams of, when he doesn’t think himself cursed by the gods of the Northern Britons as he must be, because he knew himself before he took Esca back to them and now that he has brought Esca back with him, Marcus knows nothing.

As he does nothing. There is nothing in his days but riding and a pension, and nothing in his nights but memories he does not want, and in them both, Esca, who is Freedman and yet chooses to sleep on a pallet in Marcus’s room as though still a slave and listen to Marcus’s shame as the dreams take him.

He supposes Esca is also a man of nothing, no legion, no tribe, no family, no wife, but it is not Esca who is haunted for all that his mouth grows tighter with every passing day.

Marcus lays in bed long into the morning and watches Esca as he rises, as he shaves and dresses, one after the other, simple motions of things that need to be done, actions with purpose, however simple. He has to swallow his longing. Esca will disappear to bring him food but he will leave it on the table some distance away, so that Marcus will rise too if he wishes to eat. He will not look at Marcus again until Marcus has also shaved.

It’s a temptation to stay in bed however many days it will take to make Esca’s eyes turn to him again, but Marcus is a man, so he forces himself always to his feet. When he returns from the baths, it is always to Esca’s careful smile.

But at night they return, his hot visions. He dreams of school and battles and his men. Sometimes a Druid surprises him as he sleeps and he wakes as the blade swings down to sever his head from his neck. Sometimes he wakes first and rouses his men and it is the Druid who is caught under a hurtling chariot.

Like the dead Druid, Marcus was once a leader of men. He had once thought it was all he could ever wish to be.

If he wakes tense, reaching for a knife Esca has moved out of his reach without his permission, Esca will sit up as he does and watch him as he catches his breath. He doesn’t ask what the dream was, as though he can guess. These times Marcus fears his every thought is known to Esca and flushes to have him know. But Esca only ever brings him a piece of wood and returns his blade to him now that he is awake and then he falls back asleep halfway across Marcus’s bed while Marcus carves creatures until he is calm again.

Esca's limbs seem long when they are splayed across Marcus’s bed, marks and freckles dot his skin without marring it. His muscles are firm, his tattoos fierce.

He has made Esca quite a menagerie, dozens of animals held in Esca’s hands, stroked by his slender fingers, before finally placed in a window to be admired later.

Marcus no longer carves eagles. They are the one thing that have ceased to torment him when he closes his eyes. His father is at rest it seems but Marcus cannot help but wonder what he thinks of his lame son, who has restored his honor after nearly losing his own. A slave has no honor.

The slave dreams Marcus cannot wake from. He claws at the edges of them, looking for a way out no matter how cowardly it is to run, but there is never escape until he opens his eyes and Esca tells him it is time to go. There is nothing in that to frighten a centurion. He has known pain and fear and dirt before.

But he rages because he cannot scream. He will not scream, he is Roman and his father’s son and he will never let them hear him scream, but he wants to, he wants to shout across his dreams at Esca for leaving him and for saving him when he should have let them kill him. He lives with dishonor for both and Esca had given him life, as a slave did not even have the choice of death. He hates Esca then, hates him until his eyes are open, because he has no voice, no tongue, and when he wakes, Esca’s fingers gentle in his hair, he cannot speak.

He was not a man. He was Esca’s, as Esca had once been his.

Esca will speak then, strange sentences in his barbarian tongue that make Marcus hide shudders until he realizes that Esca points to things as he speaks and repeats words in Latin, over and over again, teaching him his tongue so that Marcus might know it, until it can no longer hurt him in his sleep.

Marcus studies Esca’s mouth as if he could see each breath as it touches his lips until Esca grows silent. There is a moment between words, a long moment, when Marcus again thinks Esca reads his thoughts, or that he has spoken them in his sleep, and then he remembers that he cannot speak in his dreams, and praises the gods for giving him that.

Esca will move on then, continue the lessons that Marcus does his best to retain so he will not think of Esca shivering from nightmares in their time before the wall, of Esca hating himself and those who held him, hating Marcus, but the thought remains, like a worm in an apple, making him turn away.

Esca thought of death too and it’s that which finally spurs Marcus to look for peace in cup after cup of wine.

The dreams grow worse under its influence, his rest more fitful. He is no longer Centurion or slave but both, on his knees with Esca’s hands, Esca’s nimble fingers tangling in his hair, yanking his head back.

There is no knife to press to the throbbing vein in his neck, but his life is in Esca’s hands. They pull back, tight, nails dragging over Marcus’s scalp as though he nothing more than a pet, and his head goes back, his bared throat there at Esca’s will, and he does not fight, he does not fight.

He wakes with his voice hoarse and his mouth open and dry and Esca gone from his room. Esca does not linger when Marcus has been drinking. It is his disdain that makes Marcus finally stop, though he is aware with each drunken night that he has fallen further in the eyes of his people and it is their opinion of him that should matter.

A Roman, a proper Roman, would not lose himself in such a manner.

A proper Roman would never have been a slave, would be a farmer if he could not be a soldier.

He suggests it one evening when he is eying the wine that he will not let himself have and Esca is not speaking to him. Esca seems taken aback by the idea, perhaps merely at the idea of Marcus the farmer, or perhaps to see himself as one as though he has also forgotten that he is free to do as he pleases and Marcus will of course share the reward for the Eagle with him.

But his surprise at Marcus’s offer to buy land somewhere and live together as farmers is only for a few minutes and then he nods, and grins, and when he does talk, he speaks of the crops of his people. Marcus listens longs into the night as Esca lets him hear his plans and smiles vaguely at Esca’s pleasure and the idea of one day being able to truly rest in an orchard of peaches, with blossoms or fruit around him and Esca’s voice nearby until he falls asleep in his chair.

It is then, when sober and considering his future, Esca’s future, that the dreams of his past come. In these, Marcus is young again, not yet needing to shave regularly, and Lucius Tarpeias Sabinus, his father’s friend and brother-in-arms teaches him the ways of men and mentors him and it is Marcus’s honor to have his favor.

His cock had seemed large in him, his hand big at his hip as he’d grunted and Marcus had closed his eyes at the surprising wave of pleasure, of being fucked, though it had only been a few times before Lucius had taken him out to fuck a whore.

In the fire of his dreams Marcus is there, bent to the bed, stretched and groaning, and he wakes hard and crying out as he never has for pain. There’s no childish stickiness between his legs, only a slight dampness and heat to think of Esca’s eyes and what they will say, how dark they will grow when Marcus turns to meet them.

He does not know Esca’s people’s ways and he cannot ask without deepening his shame. And he does not know what Esca has seen of Romans, if he has also glimpsed men who have no shame fuck each other as though they were equals with one on his back, scratching and pleading for more with his legs bent and his mouth wet and bitten. If he had heard of men who used their slaves in this way or perhaps used other Romans in such a way, as if dishonor did not matter to a stiff cock.

Marcus is not a boy. He does what a man does and finds a woman to penetrate. He pays her well and takes her mouth as that is the skill she is known for. But the sight of her on her knees with her mouth full makes him shiver and he returns home later unsatisfied, aware for the first time that though they may fade, nothing will never banish these dreams. They have seeped into his waking moments too.

He is broken, truly, and feels it inside him when Esca does not sleep in his room that night, or the next. Marcus takes to drink again and wakes to splintered pain he can bear and the absence of Esca’s touch, which he can’t.

He returns the wine to the keeping of Stephanos and fills his empty mouth with water and prays to any god that will listen for a relief that does not come and dreams, he always dreams.

He is on his knees, his head back at Esca’s command, but with Esca before him, and he wakes fully aroused. His hands are bound and he is again stretched out on Lucius’s bed though the entire villa can hear his lustful cries and when his eyes open, he feels hollow. He is on his back and there is pain, so much pain, and then there is Esca pushing down from above him, pushing into him, and his mouth is open and his legs are bent.

Even that is mild compared to the one that will not leave his mind, the one that lingers behind his eyelids even during the day. He dreams of his uncle’s house, and of this room without a pallet in it, and Esca. Esca splayed upon his bed with his face to the pillows and foreign words that Marcus can understand leaving his mouth as Marcus enters him.

That is the most shameful and Marcus rides until his leg is stiff and he cannot move, but he cannot escape it.

He does not know who he is, but he is no true Roman, not when Esca appears to help him from his horse and to the room that haunts him and he turns his head from the sight of Esca’s mouth and knows every place where Esca’s hands have touched him. Esca is a man, and free, and will not be dishonored by him and turned into some sort of Greekling who recognizes neither age nor station in his choice of who to fuck. Of whom he will let fuck him.

But when he closes his eyes, Marcus is on his back and Esca stares down at him, his body a hot weight Marcus could push off, but doesn’t. Esca’s hands slide to his hair and pull his head back tight, arching Marcus's neck until Marcus cannot breathe, forcing his lips to part, and Marcus knows what he wishes Esca would do and wakes with a startled, hungry cry.

The world around him is too still. His cock is full and his throat aches with things he is not sure have been said. He is a boy again who cannot control himself and flushes hotter than the small fire could make him.

Esca is there though Marcus cannot see him without opening his eyes and he does not want to do that. But he is no coward, even if he is not sure of anything else, so he looks and finds Esca leaning over him, watching him with eyes that seem too dark, as if the black in the center has swallowed up everything.

He wonders if that feels like hunger and wets his mouth. Esca’s lips are open. Marcus wants to ask him about his people though he is aroused and Esca must know it. He wants Esca to talk to him in his own tongue and tell him of his ways, and the ways of their boys, and of their men, and farming and of what dreams Esca the slave might have had. Or Esca the boy. Or Esca the warrior.

It is another weakness that he does not know these things, but Esca has seen him weak before and has never remarked on it. Esca has seen him as all things and has never doubted who he was, though how Esca calls him has changed, no longer Roman, or Master.

In the almost dark of the middle of the night, with the fire low, perhaps dreaming except for the stinging shame in his cheeks to have Esca see his need, Marcus looks over Esca’s face, and Esca leans into him, putting one knee on the bed as though to check him for fever.

“Marcus,” he says quietly, putting a hand to his face, and Marcus burns though Esca’s fingers do not venture near his hair. “Marcus,” he murmurs again, as though checking, and Marcus exhales and reaches up to grasp his arm.

Esca stops though his mouth remains open and Marcus cannot tell if it’s dream or reality when he sees his fingertips move along Esca’s lips, not daring to push inside.

If Esca thinks it shameful or worries for the Rome in Marcus, there is no sign as he allows Marcus to penetrate him, ensures it by lowering his head until he has Marcus’s knuckles at his tongue.

Esca is not of Rome. Esca is no longer of anywhere. Like Marcus, he is freed and may do as he pleases.

“Marcus,” Marcus repeats his own name, not missing the light finally shining from Esca’s eyes, as though he finds Marcus mad but does not mind.

Marcus’s smile is sudden. He does not care if he sleeps as long as this does not end, but he thinks he must be awake to find himself hard when Esca laughs at him.

“Esca,” he says a moment later, making sure and breathing fast when Esca takes his fingers deeper and slides his body over him. He is heavy and strong and hard as well. “Esca,” he murmurs again as Esca releases his fingers to mouth along his wrist and their cocks slide together with the blanket between them.

“Marcus,” Esca speaks as though Marcus is slow, but says it again to set him afire and rocks into Marcus’s open legs as the sun rises.


End file.
